Photo Credit: Flickr/ mer chau

When I left undergrad, I discovered something terrible: my education left me woefully unprepared for real engineering work.

I remember arriving at work my first week and being asked to “spec’ a cable”. I literally had no idea what that meant.

“You know, like, chose the size the conductor, the insulation rating, all that stuff.” my boss told me.

“Right”, I said, “I’m on it.”, not having a sweet clue where to start.

I was embarrassed, to say the least. How could I go through more than 4 years of school and not know something so basic?

That was the first of many eye-opening moments in the first weeks and months of my career. I came to learn that my engineering education, while excellent, was not going to be enough for me to get by in the real world of work. The academic rigour was an excellent foundation, to be sure. But what I discovered was that it wouldn’t be enough to really thrive in industry.

What I needed was a quick way to get up to speed on a lot of the practical, hands-on aspects of engineering. Sure, experience would end up being the best teacher, but I was looking for a way to short-circuit the process.

After searching high and low, I found a number of different resources that would end up being pivotal in my development as an engineer in industry. One of the best tools I found were online engineering courses meant for working professionals. Today, I want to share one my my favourites with you – PDHengineer.com.

At the end of the post, I’ll tell you how I can help give you personalized help in finding the perfect engineering course to fit what you’re looking for.

My favourite online engineering courses

PDHengineer.com is a website dedicated to continuing education for engineers. It currently offers a number of courses (804, to be exact) in every discipline of engineering, as well as peripheral subjects like business, law, and ethics.

What I loved so much about the website is that it’s courses were affordable, and that I could do them on my own time. That way, I could pick up whatever course I wanted, and tackle it at my own pace. The other thing I like a lot about this site is that it’s courses are accredited for professional development hours in the United States. To me, that leant a certain level of credibility to the course material.

Pros

What I like about PDHEngineer.com is that:

• It’s affordable – most courses are in the $30 to $90 range. Some others are really expensive, but that’s the exception rather than the rule
• I can study on my time. There’s no need to attend classes or rearrange my life.
• The system is simple. Just download the course material, study it, and take the test.
• You can take the test as many times as you need to pass.
• Quality materials – the teachers are experts in their field, and PDHEngineer.com itself has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau

Cons

There are some downsides to this site, too.

• No classmates – Often, I find it helpful to discuss things with classmates, but you don’t get that here.
• No deadlines – Some people might see this as a good thing, but not having any deadlines means that you could, in theory, get away with never finishing a class because there’s nobody hounding you to get things done.

Who is this for?

I recommend this site to any engineer in any discipline who wants to dig into the more practical aspects of engineering practice. To be sure, there are a lot of academic topics, too, but  I think it’s best for “working professional” education.

I’d also recommend it for people of one discipline who are working in or with another discipline. One good example is a course on Electrical Engineering for Non-Electrical Engineers. This is a great way to get versed in the language of other disciplines.

With the cons mentioned above, the site is definitely not for people who have a hard time with self-discipline. Some people need to structure of a classroom and specific deadlines. If you’re that kind of engineer, I’d suggest you skip this and check out coursera.org as an alternative.

How does it work?

PDHEngineer.com is easy to use. All you do is:

1. Find a course
2. Study the material
3. Take the test (as many times as you need to pass)
4. Print the certificate
5. Do your happy dance

The rest of the post will be a walk-through of these  steps to show you what the site is all about.

An Example

1. Finding a course

Finding a course is easy. First, go to www.PDHengineer.com to get to the home page.

I like to search through courses by discipline. For example, if I want to find an electrical engineering course, I use the list of disciplines on the sidebar.

Once there, I’ll find a course that I’m interested in. Today, I’ll take a course on Induction and Synchronous Motor Fundamentals to show you how everything works.

Click on the course you want, then click “Preview Course”

The “Preview Course” option is awesome. What it lets you do is review a PDF of the course material before you actually buy the course. It used to be that you got the whole course in the preview, which was awesome, but now you only get the first few pages. It’s still enough to get a sense for a couple important things:

• The material that is covered
• The depth/ complexity of the material
• The style that the author uses to convey the information

I think it’s important for you to really consider each of these points before deciding to buy a course. You definitely want to make sure that the course is covering the material you’re interested in and to the depth you need.

Once you’ve decided you like a course, just go back to the course page and click the “Add to Cart” button.

From there, you can either look for more courses, or just go on to buy the course. In this example, I’ll just buy the one course.

Once you’ve done this, you follow the prompts to set up an account and provide your payment information. It works the same way as any other online shopping portal. So you know, the official company name that shows up on your receipt (either PayPal or your credit card) will be Decatur Professional Development, LLC.

Once everything goes through, you’ll end up at a “Thank you!” screen. Just click the “My Courses” link on the left to get access to your course.

Then select “My Courses and Receipts”…

And finally select your course…

That will take you to a screen where you can get started on your studying.

2. Study the material

This part is relatively straightforward. All you need to do is download the course material using the link below, and study.

If you’d like a really efficient way to study, I recommend the SQ3R method. It’s what I use now to study all of my MBA course material, and it helps me understand and retain material in half the time it took before.

Course material is nearly always in PDF format. For this example course, it’s a 9-page PDF with a couple charts and graphs.

3. Take the test

Once you’re ready, you can take the test. Most tests are multiple choice and true/ false questions. As you go through the test, you can go back to questions you were unsure of, which is great. I’ve written electronic tests in the past that wouldn’t let you do this, which can be very stressful.

For my example course, the pass mark is 70%.

To start the test, just click the “Start online test” link.

Once you do that, you’ll get a screen that shows you some information about the test. There’ll be a button at the bottom that allows you to “Attempt the quiz now”

***Protip: It might help you to write the test before studying the material. Knowing what the test questions will be like can help you focus your studying (as is suggested in the SQ3R method above). You can retake the test as many times as you need to pass, so there’s no harm in doing this. Of course, if the goal is to really get into the information, as opposed to simply earning the credit, you’ll want to study all of the material in detail.

A typical test screen looks like this…

The screen shows you your question, the possible answers, the option to flag the question and a navigation menu. To flag the question, just click the “flag question” link in the grey box. To answer a question, just select the option (a, b, c, or d) that you think best answers the question. The answer will be saved automatically.

The test only shows a certain number of questions per page. For my example test here, there are only 5 questions per page of the 10 questions total.  To get to the next questions, click the “Next” button at the bottom of the page.

Once you’ve answered all the questions, go to the last page and make sure all your answers were registered. Then, click the “Submit all and finish” button.

Once you’ve clicked the submit button, you should be able to see your test results. You’ll get a breakdown of your overall score, the questions you answered correctly and incorrectly, and the correct answers for all those questions you got wrong.

If you didn’t pass the test, you’ll have the opportunity to review what went wrong, and you can take another crack at it.

If you passed, you can move on to print your certificate.

4. Print your certificate

To print your certificate for the course you just passed (Yay!), click the “Return to course home” link.

Then select the “Certificate of Completion” link.

Your certificate will look something like this…

5. Do your happy dance

Now, I highly recommend you celebrate. You officially made progress towards becoming a better engineer! Woot woot!

Let me help you!

In order to help you along with your continuing education, I’d like you to tell me what course you’d love to be able to take. Just write me with your request in the comments section below, and I’ll find the best course  I can for you on PDHEngineer.com. I promise to write you back with what I find, and if I can’t find anything for you on that site, I’ll come up with a recommendation for you from some other website.

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